Retro Adventures – Legend of Mana

💡This series is not spoiler free. Like at all. This is not “b4ux1t3 reviews games”. I'll be talking about things that strike me as interesting, going all the way through the game. While I'm not going to lay the story out as I go, it's inevitable that story points will bleed through. I will endeavor to leave spoilers “below the fold”, so to speak, but you have been warned. ;)

I had a PlayStation as a kid. I don't remember when we got it, but it was after the N64. We only had it a few years before the PS2 came out, and we only had a couple games for it. That's a long way to say I never played this game growing up, and in fact hadn't even heard of it until I saw the gameplay on one retro YouTube channel or another.

The PlayStation is known for one thing above all else: Chunky, flickering 3D geometry. Sure, there were a few big names in the 2D space (Chrono Trigger, e.g.), but I think a lot of people, myself thoroughly included, remember it for the advancements in 3D. Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid, Twisted Metal. . .those are the games I think back to. I don't think we owned a single 2D PS1 game.

That's okay, though. I'm making up for my lack of culture now, thirty years later.

In my last post, I said that I won't be doing a review, but I will say right now: If you like action RPG games with intentional, thought-provoking combat, you'll like this game. There are some modern conveniences that would be “nice to have”, but the combat loop here is great. They tried to hide the fact that this is “just” an action RPG with a bunch of randomization and a little bit of player-lead, literal world building, but at the end of t he day you're playing through the same few stories, with the world map laid out a bit differently every time. This is not a bad thing. It just is what it is.

Anyway, time to talk about the thing that made me want to start this blog post:

Just Look At It

Look at this art.

Pixel-art interior of a wooden tavern in Legend of Mana, featuring warm golden lighting from a stone fireplace, candle-lit tables, wooden stairs, and rugs. A young character in a pink outfit stands near a table, surrounded by chairs and furniture. The scene depicts a cozy, rustic town setting typical of the game's early areas, rendered in the 16-bit style of PlayStation-era RPGs.

I went in here to stop an elf from doing bad things to this poor barmaid. Or, you know, so I assumed. Turns out it was all misunderstanding, and the dude is just a massive jerk, not a creep. But it's okay because he was upset about missing his. . .sister? I dunno. Whatever. Not the point. This place is throwaway for me so far. There's no one in here, and as such I have no reason to walk around. But, walk around I did.

16-bit pixel-art interior of a two-story wooden tavern in Legend of Mana. A character in a pink outfit stands on a balcony overlooking a lower level with a bar counter, tables, and stairs. Warm golden lighting from hanging lamps and candles illuminates wooden beams, stone flooring, and rustic furniture. The scene depicts the game's early town setting, rendered in PlayStation-era RPG style with detailed textures and soft lighting.

You can go upstairs. And upstairs is so “on-limits” that the singular NPC in here will also go up the stairs. I'm not in some throw-away room where some story plays out before I move on to the next nondescript room to have yet more exposition layered on me. I'm in a quaint, homey tavern that's just experiencing a midday lull in customers.

Admitting It To Myself

I suffered for many years under a single delusional way of thinking: better graphics means better game. In the PS1 era, I was a kid. To me, I barely understood the difference between 3D and 2D other than the 2D games looked like cartoons (for KIDS, yuck) and the 3D games looked like they were grown-ups, and I badly wanted to be a grown-up.

This way of thinking followed me for far too many years. And it's not even like I didn't get exposed to the beauty that is 2D art and video games. Many of my friends tried to get me to play Chrono Trigger, and I just kept saying “It's not my thing, man”. Sure, I did play the original Final Fantasy games on the GBA, and I had a decent enough time of it. But that was mostly a curiosity, relegated, again, to the “lesser” handheld console.

Editor's note: One of these days I should probably pick those games up again and see what I missed in my naive “get to the end of the game” playthroughs.

Put another way, I was an idiot. Even after I grew up a little, and started getting really into indie games with the Xbox 360, I didn't think to start looking back at games I might have dismissed as a kid. I'd happily play new old games, ones I hadn't heard of as a kid. But the ones that I'd already dismissed as a kid felt like I wouldn't like them. “Yeah it's just not my thing.”

With Fresh Eyes

The sheer amount of care that is put into this game is staggering. Look at this little area, zoomed in a little:

Close-up pixel-art view of a wooden tavern bar in Legend of Mana, featuring a curved counter with bottles, stools, and warm golden lighting from a hanging lamp. The scene highlights detailed textures and soft illumination typical of PlayStation-era RPGs, capturing the game's early town setting. This cropped section focuses on the bar area, emphasizing the rustic, cozy atmosphere of the tavern interior.

Unlike the copy-pasted bottles and forks and whatnot that pervade 3D games of all generations, every one of these objects has to be hand-drawn into the background here. The little hallway going into the back of the establishment, with the door that, to my modern eye, says “Bathroom's that way”.

This level of detail is everywhere in this game.

Don't Hear the Words I'm Not Saying

There is a certain subset of folks who are passionate about games, in particular retro and/or indie games, who decry 3D as some kind of anti-pattern. I've heard people who I generally respect say things like “Well look how well Mario 64 has aged compared to Super Mario World”. 3D is not a bad thing, and it's just as possible to make 3D games that stand up to the scrutiny that time brings. I haven't switched from “3D is for adults and 2D is for babies” to “2D is for adults and 3D is for babies”.

Games are art. Not all art needs to be for all people; this is a thing that the indie community understands implicitly. It is also a thing that the large publishers and studios seem to have largely forgotten.

But, y'all, all of my favorite games, as of today, are 2D. ;)

What's Next?

I don't even know what format this blog post was in. I basically just blabbered about how pretty the pixel art is. Next post, I think I want to talk about the combat, but I'm still terrible at it, so I want to let the game teach me as I go.

I'm thinking that the actual format for this blog will basically be “Here's a bunch of stream of consciousness ramblings about specific aspects of the game that occur to me while I'm playing” with a mega post at the end of a game where I summarize and rehash what I've found, hopefully coming to some kind of meaningful conclusion.